Nazilli Menderes Anadolu Lisesi. Turkey
Menderes Anatolian High School is in Nazilli in the west of Turkey. Our institution, which prepares students to a higher education in the fields of science, social sciences and foreign languages, is a state high school. The pupils, who are registered to school according to their exam results, are between 14 and 18 years old. As the students are enrolled to school according to the exam results done by the state, they are from different backgrounds in the sense of economy and social structure.
As for the physical structure; there are 32 classrooms, with two physics, one chemistry, one biology and one computer lab and a library, one music room and one art room. There are 55 teachers and 798 pupils. The school provides the students with various extracurricular activities such as folk dancing, basketball and theatre.
As Quality Improvement Team at school, we have a European Development Plan which focuses on internationalization of our school. It is obvious internationalization affords many benefits to higher education, and it invariably strengthens international and intercultural relationships of our students. It is crucial for our students because they have been raised in small/closed culture. And it is not very common for them to travel/study abroad, actually they even don’t know there is another world than their small hometown.
We have been involved in several international projects and since the first project we involved, we have experienced how those projects help them to learn new cultures, break down the prejudices, work/learn/play together with their peers, open their mind, gain self-confidence … and many more. Taking part in this project will also motivate and encourage both the pupils and the staff to learn foreign languages more effectively. Those projects help them to see some linkage between what they are currently learning and English for communication.
The teachers who take part in the project have a great experience on those kinds of projects and they collaborate effectively. The key people of the project, Işıl İpek Karagözlü- Yeliz Sümer, have attended different programs both in Europe and in the country.
They also attended some programs on writing projects and running them effectively. We run our project works with an effective team at school so the workload is shared among all team members. Other members of the team will take over their role, if they will have to leave. It is a priority for us to keep up pace with the new technology and has always had a good view of Europe.
The result has been the participation of students and teachers in events organized by the European authorities and participation in a Comenius Project and two Erasmus+ Projects before. We are currently running another Erasmus+ project called MIGRANT. The Quality Improvement Team at school is working on a KA201 and KA101 for the next years. Since 2010 we have had good experience and strong relationships with many different schools from all over Europe.